ReRead, ReWrite, Burn Tag

Oooo goody, a chance for me to have an unpopular opinion! Yay!!!

So I saw this tag on Modern Witch’s Bookshelf back in June, and I’ve been wanting to do it ever since. Even though I’m doing a tag every week, I’m still so backed up… Whatever not the point. The point is, I’m really excited to talk about some of the books I’ve read this year, though I doubt I would actually burn any of them. LET’S DO THIS!

Also, go follow Samantha from Modern Witch’s Bookshelf if you don’t. She’s the bestest.

Rules

• Randomly choose 3 books
• For each group, decide which book to burn, which one to rewrite, and which to reread (like Marry, Boff, Kill).
• Repeat until you completed three rounds (or six) (or however many you want to do).

So I’m going with books I’ve read so far this year, and choosing them using a random number generator. Here we go! Wee!

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Round One

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Carry On, The Eyre Affair

ReRead: I feel like it’s almost cheating on this one, because I’ve re-read Half-Blood Prince dozens of times, and will keep reading it for my whole life. It’s my second favorite Potter book, and I love how well Rowling balanced the light-hearted moments with the heavy themes.

ReWrite: I love Rainbow Rowell, and I love the way she writes, but for a fantasy book there really wasn’t enough adventure for my taste. I would love to re-do this one with a little more adventuring and a little fewer whiteboards.

Burn: I don’t want to burn The Eyre Affair, but it just sort of got the short end of the stick here. I want to reread it less than HP, and I definitely wouldn’t rewrite it. *shrug*

Review: The Eyre Affair

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

Series: Thursday Next
Genre: Speculative Fiction
Maturity Level: 4
View on Goodreads
Rating: ⋆⋆⋆⋆

Great Britain circa 1985: time travel is routine, cloning is a reality (dodos are the resurrected pet of choice), and literature is taken very, very seriously. Baconians are trying to convince the world that Francis Bacon really wrote Shakespeare, there are riots between the Surrealists and Impressionists, and thousands of men are named John Milton, an homage to the real Milton and a very confusing situation for the police. Amidst all this, Acheron Hades, Third Most Wanted Man In the World, steals the original manuscript of Martin Chuzzlewit and kills a minor character, who then disappears from every volume of the novel ever printed! But that’s just a prelude . . .

Hades’ real target is the beloved Jane Eyre, and it’s not long before he plucks her from the pages of Bronte’s novel. Enter Thursday Next. She’s the Special Operative’s renowned literary detective, and she drives a Porsche. With the help of her uncle Mycroft’s Prose Portal, Thursday enters the novel to rescue Jane Eyre from this heinous act of literary homicide. It’s tricky business, all these interlopers running about Thornfield, and deceptions run rampant as their paths cross with Jane, Rochester, and Miss Fairfax. Can Thursday save Jane Eyre and Bronte’s masterpiece? And what of the Crimean War? Will it ever end? And what about those annoying black holes that pop up now and again, sucking things into time-space voids . . .

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This is such a wacky, eclectic book! It’s really hard to give an impression of it, just because there are so many different things going on, and such a variety of vibes. But I think that’s the main thing about what makes The Eyre Affair such a great book.

The New TBR Plan

Making room for variety AND re-reads

I’ve posted a couple of times in the last sixth months or so about my rather bizarre current tbr solution. I found that when left to my own mood-reading habits, I tend to pick up more YA fantasy than I can actually put up with, and I read a lot of books that are all kind of the same and get bored of them. Any time I would love a book it was usually something sufficiently DIFFERENT from all the other things I’d been reading. So I made up a solution where I had to read one of each genre before I could read another.

It was a lot. I ended up with 10 genres. YA, mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, historical fiction, classics, and on and on and on. I really like this method because I was getting in a lot of variety and trying out a lot of kinds of books I hadn’t read much of before. It also forced me to read some of the literary fiction that had been sitting on my tbr for a while and not read because it isn’t as flashy and exciting as genre fiction.

The problem is, as I’ve been posting about literally all summer, that it left even less time for re-reading. When you’re forcing yourself to read ten genres, how can you possibly find time to re-read? I couldn’t.

So after some long, hard thinking, I decided it was time to reform.

Top 10 Books I Want to Re-Read

An inadvertent theme here on Never Not Reading this summer has been re-reading. I have been consistently lamenting that I don’t re-read books anymore, and I’ve found out that I’m not alone! Apparently a lot of book bloggers prioritize reading new things over re-reading for the sake of creating content for their blogs, but wish they could find the time to re-read.

So today I bring you the books that not re-reading is breaking my heart.

10. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

I read this book my senior year of high school and was so enchanted by it. I want to re-read it partly because it’s been long enough that I can’t remember it very clearly, and I want to get to know it again. But also because I bet that there’s a lot more to this book that I missed. I’m a much better reader than I was thirteen years ago, and I bet I would appreciate it at a much deeper level. I’ve been itching to re-read this one since I saw it on The Great American Read last summer.

Six Degrees of Separation: The Arsonist to The Nest

Six Degrees of Separation is a monthly blog event hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest. It’s inspired by the 6 Degrees of Separation, a movie game where you attempt to connect actors in six movies or less. But we do it with books!

This month we’re starting with The Arsonist by Chloe Hooper.

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I had never heard of The Arsonist before, probably because it’s an Australian true crime novel. It is, unsurprisingly, the story of the police trying to catch an arsonist. Go figure. True crime isn’t really my genre, but another novel I read and enjoyed set in Australia is…